5 Content Curation (content enhancement) WordPress Plugins

by admin

No more Content Aggregation – let’s do Content Curation to bring value to readers along with search engine position

Content Aggregation (which is just a fancy term for the automated gathering of links and content from the web) can be viewed on sites like Google News and several other news kind of websites. Generally, this kind of aggregation may be seen being a good thing for content creators and content publishers and uptill recently, it was upto the technology to do this – meaning – automated scripts or bots – that could help fill up content from different sources. The part of content creation was and has generally been a very human effort.

But all this is now changing with Content Curation — what is content curation? – It is the act of human editors adding their work to the computer programs that gather, collate, organize and filter content.

An wonderful blog post about “content curation” is found on Robin Good’s weblog – . You absolutely need to read this. It’s a guest post by Rohit Bhargava, the author of an brilliant book called “Personality Not Included”.

Here’s a part from Robin’s blog

“A Content Curator is someone who continually finds, groups, organizes and shares the best and most relevant content on a specific issue online.”

“Curation comes up when search stops working,” says author and NYU Professor Clay Shirky. But this is far more than just a human-powered filter – like a Wikipedia or related human based content aggregation service. “Curation comes up when people realize that the world is no longer only about information seeking, it is also (now) about synchronizing communities together.”

One of the reasons that human curation is so very critical is simply because of the vast amount of people who’re now making and sharing media. “Everyone today is a media outlet”, says Shirky. “The point of everyone being a media outlet is really not at all complex – rather it’s quite simple. It means that we can all put things out in the public view now.”

So who are these content curators? What can they gather and re-publish? Do they have the right to get paid for curation? If so, who’s adding the real value, the content makers or the curators/publishers?

“If you are a blogger and want to put good content out there for your readers – your job should be to be the “content curator” – nothing more. You don’t have to write your own opinion and you don’t have to put a lot of time in writing a post. It’s not supposed to win a Pulitzer Price. Your only goal is to get the “market news” on your blog and get it indexed by Google.”

These questions are still being answered by the community but for now, let’s deal with how you can use 5 great wordpress plugins to bring content curation to your own blogs – these are all wordpress plugins and all of them are free so there is no reason not to try them – if you try one or more of these, leave me a comment and let me know what you think of these tools.

Insights is one of those This is an uber-cool, useful and timesaving wordpress plug-in.

Let’s say you’ve written a post about “green houses”. Insights will pull in results from other (related) blogs that talk about green houses. You also have the ability to add Flickr photos, YouTube videos and Wikipedia results. This plug-in acts as a “Content Enhancer” and will make your post stand out by including as much relevant information about your topic as possible.

Insights brings a powerful new way to write your blog posts. It increases productivity and at the same time quality of your posts.

Zemanta is similar to the Insights plug-in mentioned above. It pulls in similar information but also pulls in relevant tags, images from other sources as well as Amazon results. If it’s similar to Insights, then why use it? Simple – every time I use Zemanta (which is literally every time I write a post), it pulls in additional and/or different results then Insights. So, both of these plug-ins make “each other” better by using them in combination. If you see, some of the posts on this website have “Related links from Zemanta” – that’s what it’s all about.

Apture helps you add multimedia to your blog with one click. It’s used by popular sites such as the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, but we are giving it to you for FREE. With Apture, you can keep readers on your site and create more content in less time. Ever wanted to add Searches from Twitter or maybe link to that specific episode on Hulu of your favorite show? Well with Apture you can. Did we also mention it’s Free

Benefits

Decreased Bounce Rate for your blog. See here

Increased Time On Site. Your readers are going to be engaging with all of the content Apture adds to your blog right on your site.

Snap Shots products are used on over 2,000,000 websites and blogs, who appreciate the improved experience we provide their users along with the additional advertising inventory we create. Our Engage products help major content owners add depth to their own offerings and extend their reach across our network to build awareness, traffic and revenue. Together, they comprise a complete solution that’s helping to reaggregate content and users in an increasingly fragmented Internet.

Metaweb plugin is a WordPress plugin that allows you to easily add Metaweb TopicBlocks to your blog posts directly from within WordPress. You can quickly add TopicBlocks to individual blog posts or have TopicBlocks automatically inserted whenever you use certain tags.

A Freebase icon will appear on your WordPress “Edit Post” page, allowing you to insert TopicBlocks with the click of a button.

You can create a rule that says, “Whenever I tag a blog post with ‘avatar_movie’ insert an Avatar TopicBlock at the bottom of the post.” To create rules like this, click the “Connect Tags to Freebase” button on your WordPress tags page.